|
Related Article |
|
 Thousands
join rally against 'grave injustice' to Malegaon blast accused
Thousands of people in the textile town February 01 came out
strongly against, what the organizers term as, the 'inept'
attitude of the Maharashtra government, which fails to take a firm
stand on the fate of the Muslim youths arrested in 2006 Malegaon
blast even after the confession of the right wing Hindu terrorist
groups.
» |
In the wake of startling media
revelations about the role of Hindutva forces in acts of terror
across the country, several well-known human rights groups,
including ANHAD, Foundation for Civil Liberties, INSAF, and the
Jamia Teacher’s Solidarity Association, held a one-day
national-level meeting meet in New Delhi last week under the
banner ‘Tracing Sangh Terror Links and Stories of Innocent Muslim
Boys’. A number of top political leaders, including AB Bardhan of
the CPI, Sitaram Yerchury of the CPI (M), Ram Vilas Paswan of the
Lok Janshakti Party, and senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh, as
well as noted journalists and human rights activists from across
India testified to the alarming phenomenon of Hindutva terrorism.
They bemoaned the fact that the media had all along remained a
mute spectator to this development and to the targeting of
innocent Muslims in the name of combating terrorism, even in cases
where, as is now being proven, acts of terror were the handiwork
of Hindutva groups. Speaker after speaker spoke of how anti-Muslim
bias has entered every sector of the state apparatus, besides
being deeply-rooted in society at large, this being further stoked
by Hindutva terrorism that aims at blaming Muslims for terrorism
and promoting the demonization of the community. They recounted
how security agencies routinely employed extra judicial
confessions extracted under torture from Muslims wrongly accused
of terrorism as the basis of their claims and charge sheets for
various blasts cases, including those which have been now shown to
be the work of Hindutva forces.
A number of Muslims wrongly accused of masterminding terror
attacks, including those engineered by Hindutva activists,
testified at the meeting. One of these, Abu Zafar from Azamgarh,
was picked up along with several of his friends and thrown into
jail. He spoke of how extra-judicial arrests of innocent Muslims
had become something of a pattern, and of how they were subjected
to brutal torture and forced to sign fake confessions. ‘Muslims
have become second-cl-ass citizens. We are made to feel guilty
being Muslim,’ he said. ‘We have no complaint against those who
are openly anti-Muslim’, he stressed, ‘because that is only what
is expected of them. Our complaint is against those who call
themselves secular, like the Congress. It is in all these decades
of Congress rule since 1947 that the conditions of the Muslims
have so rapidly deteriorated.’ He added that persecution of
innocent Muslims in the name of combating terror was reported not
just in BJP-ruled states but even in states ruled by the Congress.
‘We Muslims are not begging for anything. All we want is justice.
No country can survive without justice,’ he said.
Qutb Jahan Shaikh from Gujarat spoke about her nephew, Mohammad
Parvez, who was picked up by the police in 2003. He was first
implicated in the Tiffin Bomb case and then in the Haren Pandya
murder case, along with several other Muslim boys. She insisted
that her nephew was innocent and was wrongly framed, accusing Modi
of being behind Pandya’s death.
According to recent media revelations, 18-year old Mumbai college
girl Ishrat Jahan, slain in 2004, might well have been yet another
victim of numerous fake encounters in which Muslims have been
killed. Rauf, her uncle, spoke about how Ishrat was, so he said,
falsely accused of being involved in a plot to kill Modi, and how
sections of the media continue to parrot that claim. ‘I’ve heard
advocates in the Gujarat High Court openly say that no judge there
can give any judgment against Modi’, he said. He spoke of several
innocent Muslims who have been killed or arrested, falsely accused
of being terrorists, being denied justice in the courts and
continuously being reviled by the media. In the few cases of such
arrested persons being released, their lives have been completely
destroyed, and they find it virtually impossible to find any sort
of employment. The media remains studiously silent on them even
after they have been proven innocent, and rarely, if ever,
apologises for having denounced them, repeating the claims of
biased, anti-Muslim investigative agencies, as terrorists.
Another victim from Gujarat, Khatoon Bi, a resident of Godhra,
spoke of her three sons who are languishing in jail on terror
charges for nine years. Insisting that they are innocent and have
been wrongly framed, she said she simply could not afford the cost
of meeting them and that she and her daughters-in-law are forced
to survive by begging.
The well-known journalist Iftikhar Gilani, who had to spend months
in jail on trumped-up terror-related charges, spoke of how, when
he was finally released, on being found innocent, he had hoped
that his case would serve as a lesson for the government, the
judiciary, the media and the investigative agencies. Lamentably,
no such lesson had been learnt, he said, and the targeting of
innocent Muslims continues unabated. If justice could not be
secured from the courts, and judges were indifferent to the plight
of innocent people wrongly accused of being terrorists and
subjected to torture on this account, he said it was a very
dangerous phenomenon.
Abdur Rahim, an auto-rickshaw driver was picked up, along with
dozens of other Muslims, in the wake of the Mecca Masjid blast in
Hyderabad. He was kept in illegal custody for almost five months,
and subjected to brutal torture, including electric shocks. While he
was in jail, his family had to undergo no less severe punishment.
His brothers lost their jobs, and his sister was sent back by her
in-laws, who were fearful of being branded for relations with an
alleged terrorist. ‘Today, it is far easier to pounce on and catch
a Muslim in India, than a goat or a chicken’, he remarked. Now
that it had been proven that Hindutva groups were behind the Mecca
Masjid blast, he insisted that the Government of Andhra Pradesh
apologise to all the Muslims of India because it had ‘forced them
to lower their heads in shame.’
Rais, another innocent Muslim man picked up in the wake of the
Mecca Masjid blast, spoke of how, after six months in jail, where
he was badly tortured, he was released, but because he had been
tainted as an alleged terrorist by the police and the media, it
was impossible for him to find employment. ‘People began calling
me Bomb Blast Rais, and now the police still harass me and warn me
against speaking to the media.’ Revealing the motive behind his
illegal detention, he said that when the Gujarat police came to
Hyderabad to arrest a certain Maulana Nasiruddin, he had asked
them why they were taking the Maulana. The policemen answered back
threatening that they would ‘repeat Gujarat’ in Hyderabad—in other
words, ensure a replay of the horrific anti-Muslim violence that
rocked Gujarat in 2002. Thereupon, they shot dead a friend of Rais’
who was present on the occasion. Later, Rais was falsely
implicated by the police in the Mecca Masjid blast case.
Mufti Ismail, MLA from Malegaon, a town where terror attacks have
now been traced to Hindutva groups, spoke of how scores of
innocent Muslims in and around Malegaon have been thrown into
jail, where they continue to languish, for crimes that they did
not commit. ‘Apparently, being a Muslim in India is itself
becoming a crime,’ he said. ‘The Muslims’ condition has been made
such that we cannot even voice our hurt to others because they
will construe this as rebellion. Our future is deliberately being
made dark. We are being forced to become second-cl-ass citizens,
so that leave alone struggle for our rights and justice, we cannot
even talk of them.’
A resolution was unanimously passed at the meeting, which demanded
the reinvestigation of all terror cases in the last two decades,
including the Hindutva terror nexus straddling groups such as
Abhinav Bharat, RSS, VHP, BJP and Bajrang Dal leaders, together
with sections of the Indian intelligence and security agencies,
who, it said, have ‘deliberately subverted the probes as well as
the due process of law’. The government should seriously
investigate, it added, ‘the openly expressed sympathies’ towards
Hindutva ideology of certain retired policemen and bureaucrats as
this, it said, was ‘an indication of such sympathy within serving
officials of the police, army and bureaucracy.’ It also demanded
that the issue of the possibility of the Hindutva terror network
having possibly been provided not just political but also
financial and logistical support by various governments be also
investigated. It called on the Government of India to immediately
release a White Paper on the exact number of Muslim youths falsely
arrested on charges of carrying out bomb blasts at the Mecca
Masjid, in Malegaon and Ajmer and on the Samjhauta Express. These
youths should be released without any further delay. All those who
were accused, arrested or tortured in these cases must, it
demanded, be provided with compensation and rehabilitation.
Alongside this, the resolution
called for a thorough investigation into the foreign sources of
funding of Hindutva organizations. All police officers who have
engaged in torture, illegal detentions, forced custodial
confessions and fabricated evidence should, it insisted, be
suspended, booked and tried under the law of the land, and any
promotions or awards they may have received for their role in
these investigations should be taken back. It called on the Andhra
Pradesh government to immediately stop contesting the claims in
the Hyderabad Civil Court for compensation of innocent Muslim
youth arrested and tortured in the aftermath of the Mecca Masjid
blasts. The Home Minister and the state governments, it added,
must issue an apology ‘for the grievous loss of dignity and
livelihood that innocents have suffered on account of the false
charges foisted upon them.’
The resolution roundly condemned the
‘edicts’ issued by various Bar Associations against lawyers who
had taken up the cases against the terror accused, even in face of
threats of physical violence. It called for lawyers who have
engaged in such attacks against fellow lawyers handling these
cases to be tried under the law. Given that investigative agencies
probing into terror attacks have, in several cases, used torture
to extract fake confessions, the resolution called for
investigations into all terror attacks in the past two decades
(which, it said, ‘have been brought under suspicion’) to be
investigated ‘afresh and objectively’ by a judicial commission
‘without negating the possibility of the Hindutva involvement in
such instances.’ The resolution also critiqued the role of the
media in demonizing the Muslims, appealing to it to ‘remain true
to journalistic ethics in critically examining the so-called
evidence placed by the investigators.’ The publication of
custodial confessions and ‘dubious results’ of ‘suspect
pseudo-scientific’ narco-analysis tests should not be published by
the media, it also stressed.
|
Comments
|
Quick links